As prominent porn site Brazzers unveils plans to pour money into the …

With thousands of people traveling to tournaments around the world and millions tuning in to live-streamed competitions online, fighting games are on the verge of becoming a bona fide, electronic spectator sport. But for the community to break into the big time, it's going to have to attract more big name sponsors beyond those like gaming peripheral maker Mad Catz and energy drink NOS, which currently help support players and tournaments financially.

So when a major corporation in one of the biggest industries in the world announced earlier this week that it was interested in potentially sponsoring the competitive fighting game scene, it should have been unvarnished good news for the community. Since that corporation is online porn giant Brazzers, however, the announcement has set off an internal debate about the image that the growing community wants to project to the world.

Pro gaming meets porn

Brazzers Director of Special Events Rob Steele confirmed the company's plans to dive into the world of fighting game sponsorship Monday evening in a live-streamedinterview with popular pro fighting game player Joe Ciaramelli, who goes by "LI Joe" online. Ciaramelli was the one who first reached out to Brazzers about potential partnerships with the fighting game community, an idea he said initially grew out of jokes his friends made about his resemblance to porn star Johnny Sins.

While Steele said he's not a gamer himself, he found others in the Brazzers office were excited about the opportunity Joe presented. "I had no idea how big the industry was... and then I brought it up to a friend of mine, and he was like you've got to jump on this. This is history right here if you get involved. This is something you've got to do," Steele said during the announcement.

What finally sold Steele on the idea of putting money into the fighting game scene, though, was watching the now-famous video of Daigo's full parry comeback at the 2004 Evolution tournament, and seeing the cheering crowds that accompanied the amazing display. Steele said videos like that convinced him that "this really is real—I have to get a company seed out there, y'know?"

While Steele didn't yet have details about what form Brazzers' pro fighting game sponsorship would take, he hinted that the company might want to back an entire team of players and even host tournaments where participants would get to hang out with some of the site's well known stars at after-parties. In other words, this doesn't sound like a small commitment.

"A potential death sentence... for the growth of the sport."

If you were watching the comments from the over 2,000 people watching Ciaramelli's live-stream Monday night, or following Twitter feeds and message boards frequented by fighting game fans, you might think the reaction to Brazzers' announcement was overwhelmingly positive. But not everyone is happy about the attention, and some are concerned that association with a porn site could stunt the burgeoning fighting game community's growth.

"I don't think many in the fighting game community realize how much of a potential death sentence this is for the growth of their sport" said a top executive involved with the fighting game business. He runs one of the more successful fighting game teams and also manages a marketing agency for companies interested in the community. Still, he requested to remain anonymous for this article because, he said, Brazzers' well-known porn brand is so toxic that he was afraid his team and his current sponsors would be tarnished by being associated with it, even in the context of commenting for a news article.

The executive's comments echoed those of many I talked to who were even more reluctant to put themselves out there as publicly against a situation that so many of their fellow players saw positively. Twitch TV outreach manager captured the general feeling among many when he tweeted his thoughts that the fighting game community was "shoot[ing] itself in the foot," in its rush to embrace this sponsorship. "This is a horrible look on all levels. And no one is speaking out?"

"Any time you engage in a sponsorship relationship with a company, they're affecting your image just as much as you're affecting theirs," the anonymous executive said. That can be a big problem for attracting other sponsors, he added, pointing out that standard endorsement contracts have clauses safeguarding against improper behavior and inappropriate content, which would include affiliation and/or links to pornography. "Any individual player who accepts sponsorship from, and correspondingly endorses the product of a porn site can pretty much kiss sponsorship from any other company goodbye," he said. "Even if and when that sponsorship ends in the future, companies won't touch those players."

The executive also expressed concerns about having his team even play against opponents that had a Brazzers logo in front of their name, or attending a tournament that featured the company as a sponsor. "It's not just about who the logo's on, it's also about putting the sponsor's brand in a safe, constructive, space—an industry or community that the sponsor can confidently say they're proud to support," he said.

That might help explain why Evo tournament co-founder Tom Cannon recently tweeted, "to be super clear, there will never be a reference to [Brazzers] at Evo, in any way, shape, or form." But the executive I talked to worried that he might have to pull his support from many smaller tournaments and events with less stringent controls, and recommend his marketing clients do the same if Brazzers was present. If the Brazzers brand was really pervasive in the community, he said, he might have to steer clear of fighting games completely "for at least two years" to protect his brand's image.

"This is a situation in which a small handful of people, by accepting sponsorship from Brazzers, have the potential to do tremendous damage to the image of an entire industry and its growth potential," he argued.

Any sponsorship is good sponsorship

"One egg shouldn't spoil the bunch but it does happen," Ciaramelli admitted in a discussion with Ars. But he also argued that certain players being willing to take money from a porn site shouldn't mean that the whole fighting game community is infected by the association.

"It's like NASCAR," he said. "You have cars race around a track with all kinds of stuff on the car that have nothing to do with the cars or racing: Jack Daniels [for instance]. Does that mean there are shots given out at NASCAR races? Is everyone driving drunk?"

For Ciaramelli, there's no such thing as a bad sponsorship, in a sense. "I think of it this way. I've been playing for 20 years. If someone is going to help me do what I love to do, and put me in the light... yeah it's maybe not such a good light, but I have the light of an entire community on me right now. It's hard to tell a company 'No, please, don't help me do what I love.'"

And Ciaramelli also argues that there may be no such thing as bad press, either, as far as this controversy is concerned. "People know about us today who didn't yesterday," he pointed out, and even if those people are potentially disgusted by potential associations with a porn site, just knowing about the community might get them to look for other players or tournament videos that they'll end up loving. "I certainly think numbers will grow from this," he said. "I think we will gain more people in the community."

Brazzers, for its part, seems sensitive to the idea that being linked to its brand comes with its own baggage. "A lot of people are kind of tentative to attach their brand to us because of what we do for a living," Steele admitted in his live chat with Ciaramelli. "It's kind of not the right thing for some people." But he also said that Brazzers wasn't trying to force itself on the fighting game community, and that the people he had talked to had all accepted the potential sponsorship idea with open arms. He also pointed out that Brazzers is expanding into less explicit, more party-focused content with its "Brazzers After Dark" sub-brand.

"We're not there to scare people off and we're not there to mess with anybody that doesn't want us," he said during the announcement. "We see something here that makes sense, and if it makes sense we’re all about it. ... In everything we do there's going to be people who don't like what we're doing, [but] at the end of the day we're a company ourselves, and we're not going to embarrass ourselves or do anything that's going to put ourselves in jeopardy."

Associating with an industry that's seen as degrading to women might be an extra-sensitive topic for professional fighting gamers now, given that accusations of sexual harassment at a tournament last month gained widespread attention and raised the specter of pervasive sexism in the community. But Ciaramelli argued that porn is a legitimate business, and that no one is being abused or exploited in this situation. "All I'm doing is wearing a shirt," he said. "There are much worse shirts I've seen at a tournament than a shirt that says Brazzers on it."

As for arguments that Brazzers sponsorships would hurt the fighting game community's efforts to reach spectators and participants of all ages, Ciaramelli says those efforts are already harmed by competitions in M-rated games like Mortal Kombat and "NOS girls half dressed at tournaments promoting a drink." He also pointed out that some players like Long "Shaddy K" Tran are sponsored by an electronic cigarette manufacturer, which hardly projects a family friendly image.

Then again, there might not be a branded image ridiculous enough to scare off Ciaramelli. "If a company came to me and said 'Hey, Joe, we like fish, please wear this fish on your head we will send you around to play,' I'd ask for a big fish to fit my skull," he said.

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl